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By Root 491 0

There’s a really narrow tunnel down there in the rock that people squirm through. If they make it, it means their sins are cleared away.” We stand for a moment, looking down toward the river. There is something completely satisfying about the whole spot. The temple is old but well kept, surrounded by neatly parceled rice paddies and shaded by large, fragrant eucalyptus trees. In the noontime light, everything shimmers but nothing moves except the river. There is no sign of any human activity and that feeling comes over me again, the feeling of being too recent and flimsy for the landscape I am in. I try to imagine who I would be if I had lived all my life here at this temple by the river. I wonder what I would want if I had grown up without ads telling me my heart’s desires: to be thinner, richer, sexier, look better, smell better, be all that I can be, have a faster car, a brighter smile, lighter hair, whiter whites, hurry now, don’t miss out, take advantage of this special offer. If instead I had spent twenty-four years absorbing the silent weight of the mountains, the constant pull of the river, the sound of hot white light burning into black rocks.

A bird sings out, a two-note song, and I come back to myself. “Let’s just stay here,” I say, because the road ahead bends and quivers in the heat, and we still have twelve kilometers to go, and standing here is like drinking spring water. Even the river hesitates at this spot, curling around the large rocks and murmuring against the banks before the current tugs it away.

The last two hours of the journey take forever. We turn a comer and see Tashigang dzong, perched on a cliff in the distance, but that’s where it remains, in the distance, a mirage, and I limp along, feet burning, stomach empty, with the refrain of “Run Joey Run” on permanent playback in my head. “I wish the Vomit Comet would come along,” I say.

“No you don’t,” Leon and Tony say in unison.

“Which would you rather have right now,” Leon says suddenly, “a sandwich with Black Forest ham on thinly sliced rye bread with Dijon mustard and a cold beer or—”

“Oh no,” Tony groans. “Not the Food Game.”

“OR, a pizza with extra thin crust, sun-dried tomatoes, onions, black olives, cheese and—”

“It’s his favorite game on long walks and bus rides,” Tony explains. “It’s torture.”

“AND a bottle of your favorite red wine,” Leon finishes.

“The sandwich,” I say. “You?”

“The pizza. Okay, now, which would you rather have for dessert, Häagen-Dazs chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream or ...”

Time speeds up. We cross Chazam discussing the merits of seafood over falafel above the loud flap and flutter of tattered prayer flags tied to the bridge railings, and take a short cut to Tashigang dzong, a forty-five-minute ascent up the steepest slope ever to bear a path. I am dizzy and painfully out of breath when we reach the cluster of prayer flags at the top, but now I understand why the dzong was built here, on this unassailable spur overlooking the river.

At the Norkhil bar, we are joined by a class VIII student Tony knows. He begins to tell us about Tashigang, how a local deity had to be subdued before Buddhism could flourish there; a small dwelling halfway down the mountain is said to hold the deity now. The dzong was built in 1688, continuing the Shabdrung’s campaign to bring the whole country under one rule. “Hey,” I interrupt, “what happened to the Shabdrung anyway?”

“What do you mean, miss?”

“In the class VIII history book, the Shabdrung’s reincarnations suddenly disappear.”

The student glances over one shoulder, then another, and begins to tell us a story. Sometime in the 1920s or 1930s, he is not sure when, the then-Shabdrung began to cause trouble with the monarchy and soon after died mysteriously “in his sleep,” but everyone knows he was assassinated, suffocated with a white silk scarf, and everyone knows the family of the man who killed him was cursed with illness, madness, loss and ruin. The next reincarnation was found somewhere in the eastern districts, but this Shabdrung also disappeared. Some people say he was