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By Root 463 0

window and are served tea and more Orange Cream Biscuits. I remember not to cross my legs and to wait for the Dzongda to begin drinking his tea before I touch mine. “Please have,” he says, gesturing to our teacups. “Thank you, Dasho,” Nancy says, and then explains who we are and where we are trying to go without diesel and why in very respectful tones. The Dzongda listens, nodding, and then rings a bell. A clerk appears, bent forward in a bow, and the Dzongda barks a long order in Dzongkha. The clerk murmurs over and over the honorific word for “all right.” “Lasso la, lass, lass, lass.” The Dzongda has ordered a release of diesel from an emergency store. He says that the District Education Officer will arrange for horses and porters to transport Lorna’s things to Bidung, I can leave tomorrow in the hi-lux, which will drop me off in Pema Gatshel and return to Tashigang to take Nancy to Thimphu. It is all settled.

Out in the courtyard, we pass a regal-looking monk with a cat-o’-nine-tails. The small monks scatter at his approach. “The Kudung,” Nancy says, “the Disciplinarian.”

“They sure take authority seriously here,” Lorna remarks.

We spend the night in a guest house, a stark, unwelcoming wooden cabin above the town. I lay awake for hours, listening to the dogs barking hysterically in the alley below. I can find nothing to throw at them except the batteries from my walkman: I fling them out into the night, and the barking continues uninterrupted.

The next morning, it is just Dorji and me on the winding road from Tashigang to the Pema Gatshel junction. Thirty minutes outside of Tashigang, we pass a cluster of immaculate white buildings spread over a green plateau. “Kanglung College,” Dorji reports. I look longingly at the neat lawns and gardens, the basketball court, the wooden clock tower that declares the wrong time in four directions. This could have been my posting, I think sadly, noticing the tidy cottages, the electricity wires, a tall young man with the most beautiful face I have ever seen, reading a book under a flowering tree.

Just outside of Kanglung, a coy road sign informs us IF YOU LIKE MY CURVES, I HAVE MANY. Another admonishes BE GENTLE ON MY CURVES. An hour later, the driver announces, “Khaling,” as we drive through a heavily misted town. An hour after that, we stop in Wamrong for lunch. I have seen no hint of the Canadian teachers already posted here and in Khaling, Leon and Tony, whom I met briefly in Thimphu. I sit on a retaining wall and nibble biscuits, looking out over the cloud-filled valley below. Two young boys stop throwing stones at a grotesquely deformed dog, to stare at me, pointing and whispering “phillingpa”—foreigner. “Kuzu zangpo, ” I greet them. They bump into each other, laughing, embarrassed, trying to scramble away.

When we reach the Pema Gatshel junction, the late-afternoon sun is already slanting over the hills. “Where is Tshelingkhor?” I ask Dorji. In Thimphu, someone said there was a village at the junction. Dorji points to two bamboo shacks at the roadside. “Shop-cum-bar,” I read. “Tshelingkhor.”

The hi-lux turns off the main road.

“Can a village be two houses?” I ask Dorji.

“Village can be one house also,” he says.

We bounce along the deeply gouged road, through a dense forest of gnarled oak, passing waterfalls and landslides. Suddenly, the forest opens and Pema Gatshel is below us, a deep, green, leafy salad bowl of a valley. Dorji points out the roof of the hospital, the dzong, a temple high on a hilltop. We drive through the bazaar, a straggling row of unpromising-looking shops. “Pema Gatshel Junior High School is there,” Dorji says, gesturing ahead. I see a metal roof, a barbed-wire fence, cement walls.

“My new home,” I think, but I do not believe it.

What to Do?

It is the third day of school, and I am standing in front of class II C. There is a blackboard but no chalk. There are no books, no crayons, no syllabus. There are, however, five students. The rest are “coming, miss.” They have been coming, miss, for three days. The headmaster, a young man with a wispy