• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 525 0

students murmur over their open books; it is the longest, coldest, slowest hour of my life. At seven o’clock, I wander around the school compound, watching students clear drains, sweep walkways, pick up garbage. There are no janitors here: in Bhutan, the students are responsible for school maintenance. This is called social work, and it is officially part of the curriculum. At breakfast, I look on uselessly as the students line up for a breakfast of boiled bulgur served from cooking pots large enough to bathe in. There is actually no need for a teacher to supervise, I think, flipping through the duty register during evening study. The students are exquisitely well-behaved. What am I supposed to write? I begin to read:

March 15. Not enough dahl at lunch time. Smaller students did not get. (Signed) Mr. Om Nath.

March 17. Class II C students very noisy at lunch time. (What! Well, of course they’re noisy at lunch time. Kids are supposed to be noisy at lunch time! How dare someone write about my kids in the duty register? I am outraged.) Scolded class VIII girls for reading library books during evening study. (Signed) Mrs. Joy.

I skim through the entries. Sangay Dorji (class V B) went to toilet during evening study, did not return. Cooks adding too much water to dahl. No water today, students could not wash. Class VIII boys sent to fix latrine. Petromax lamp broken, evening study canceled. Sonam Wangmo, class VII A, caught writing love letter to Sangay Dorji, class VI B (Mrs. Joy again). Window in girls’ hostel broken. Mr. Sharma did not show up for evening study duty. And then I find this:

Night came striding with her strident strides,

Ere gloried flowers blosoom‘d, now shadow loom’d,

And the hoary hand of abysmal darkness o’er the darkling land did

boast,

And the Lord said, “Let there be light,”

And Lo! There was no light.

From this, I surmise that the Petromax lamps were broken again. Mr. Iyya has signed his entry with a flourish.

Hidden Valleys

The strike has lifted in Assam: there is no mail from home, but fresh supplies of fruit, vegetables and staples have arrived in the market. I walk home with two bulging bags, down the road from the bazaar, past the row of teachers’ quarters. A man with a mean, swollen face is leaning on the verandah of Mrs. Joy’s place in an undershirt and a towel, smoking a cigarette. This is my first glimpse of the infamous Mr. Joy. Maya has told me that Mrs. Joy’s husband is a drunk. He used to teach, too, but was fired after passing out in the classroom. Mrs. Joy never comes to staff parties, Maya said, because Mr. Joy gets drunk and becomes “too nasty.” The man leers at me as I go by. Poor Mrs. Joy, I think. Her name seems painfully ironic now.

Outside my door, a woman with reddish gold hair and vividly blue eyes is sitting beside a box of groceries. She is Lesley, she tells me, a British teacher, she is visiting various friends and teachers in eastern Bhutan, she will go to Tsebar tomorrow to visit Jane but she’ll have to spend the night here if that’s okay with me, she is sorry to barge in like this without warning but what to do, that’s Bhutan for you, she has brought these things up from Samdrup Jongkhar for me, she’s very glad to meet me by the way, and who is that awful lecherous man in the undershirt a few doors down?

Lesley has been in Bhutan for three years. Her first posting was a village in the high, cold, subalpine district of Bumthang, where she lived for two years in a room in the temple and learned to speak Bumthap, the language of central Bhutan. She extended her contract for another year, and her next posting was one thousand meters lower, in the warm, wet jungles of Kheng, where she learned to speak Khengkha. She walked from one posting to the other, a journey of three days.

It is immediately apparent that Lesley has an encyclopedic knowledge of Bhutan. I cannot let her complete a sentence without interrupting with another question, and later, when we settle down to write letters, I take out my journal and make notes:

Reincarnations of lamas. Usually,