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By Root 534 0

and the truck lurches off down to the river, over the bridge called Chazam, and onto a rough, dusty road. The landscape is dry and sun-bleached, with chir pine trees dotting the dry, rocky slopes, a complete contrast to the wet, dense green of the enclosed Pema Gatshel valley. I turn my face into the hot wind and the girl next to me smiles and admires my silver earrings. She looks about fifteen, and has a pretty, heart-shaped face. Her earrings are thick, hand-fashioned hoops of gold. “Yours are nicer,” I tell her in Sharchhop. She shakes her head shyly. A group of students in their school ghos and kiras begins to sing. A man in a blue-striped gho, smelling strongly of arra, lurches against us when the truck turns a sharp corner and stops. We are at Duksam, two rows of crooked wooden shops along a narrow tarmacked road; several passengers leap out, several more leap on.

When the bus starts up again, I notice the man in blue has pushed himself between me and the girl. He is singing loudly as he clamps his hand over the girl’s breast. She looks away but there is no place for her to move. I cannot read her expression. I don’t know what to do, if I should do anything. Part of me is thinking, this is not your culture. You’ve been here for a few short weeks, you don’t even speak the language. You don’t know what’s going on here, who are you to interfere? The other part of me is thinking, it is perfectly clear what is going on here. It is not a matter of cultural differences. But it cannot be perfectly clear, except to a Bhutanese, and I am profoundly unsure, paralyzed by this inner argument. Finally, I work my way between the man and the girl. When he tries to reach around me, I elbow away his hand, and he looks into my face, puzzled. I look straight back. The singing around us has stopped. The man grins and shrugs and turns away. I try to look at the girl, but she is looking straight ahead and will not meet my eye. I can only hope I have done the right thing.

Rangthangwoong is halfway up a mountain, a village scattered around three large houses with ground-floor shops. Catherine is dressed in a grey kira, but her bright auburn hair sets her apart in the crowd waiting for the bus. Her quarters, located above one of the shops, consist of a bed-sitting room and, across a communal hallway, a bathroom and kitchen. She has been here for two years already, and she is very excited because the landlord has just installed a tap in her kitchen. We go to admire it, turning it on and off, laughing at ourselves. Someone has brought her a bottle of fresh buttermilk, and she pours us each a cup and then we walk up to the ruins of a ninth-century castle. Sitting below, on a grassy knoll, Catherine points to a mountain at the end of the valley. “That’s India,” she says. “The town is Tawang, in Arunachal Pradesh. At night, we can see the lights. My headmaster says you could walk there in one day.” This, of course, is illegal, she adds. You would run into the army at the border. This is where the Indo-China war spilled over into Bhutan in 1962. After the Chinese invasion of Tibet, India began to station troops along the northern frontier, including along Bhutan’s northern borders. The brief war was the result of growing tension along the northeastern Indian border, with both China and India claiming the area as their own. The older people still talk about it, Catherine says, the sudden appearance of helicopters in the sky over a village that had never even seen a vehicle. They thought it was the end of the world.

An old man with a large goiter on his neck stops to offer us betel nut smeared with lime paste and wrapped in a green leaf. Leon accepts, saying he has been meaning to try it. We watch as he stuffs the whole thing into his mouth and chews. “How is it?” we ask.

“God-awful,” he says, but keeps chewing. “It’s supposed to give you a mild high.”

After several minutes, he spits it out. “Are you high?” I ask.

“No, I’m nauseous. Are my teeth red?”

“Yes.”

The sunlight has turned a warm, liquid gold. We look up and down the length of the