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The student pauses and looks around again. “As he was falling, a bird tried to save him, and caught him with its wings, but the men in the dzong threw stones and he fell again. The river itself didn’t want to take him, and sent him back to shore, but the men came again and pushed him back in and so finally he had to die.”

He tells us that the next reincarnation was taken out of Bhutan by the Indian army during the Indo-China war, and now lives in New Delhi.

We sit quietly, digesting this, and I remember the Pema Gatshel history teacher’s reluctance to talk about the current Shabdrung. After the student leaves, we look at each other. “How much of that do you think is grounded in fact?” I ask.

“Who knows?” Leon says, shrugging.

I think about all the half-complete stories I have heard since I got here, how their incompleteness makes them resonant and powerful. History here seems a combination of official, unofficial, and forbidden stories. This tale of the Shabdrung, for instance: I don’t know where to look it up or who to ask for more information. There’s no way to know for sure. It could have happened, it might have happened, I heard it happened ... It is the impossibility of knowing for sure that makes everything possible. I am dying to know (no, I don’t want to know) the rest of the story, the whole story, the real story.

We drink several cold beers in silence. “Now where’s my ham sandwich with Dijon mustard, that’s what I want to know,” I say. But what I really want is rice and dahl and potato curry at the Puen Soom, which is fortunate, because that’s all there is.

On Tuesday morning, we search the bazaar in vain for a private vehicle going south. “It’s the Vomit Comet for sure,” Tony says.

“It’s full. We’ll never get on,” I say, watching as a woman with a jerry can of kerosene, a baby, and a bundle of frayed, faded cloth tries to press her way up the bus steps.

Leon walks around the bus, peering into the windows. “That’s not full,” he reports back scornfully. “Full means the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. Let’s go.”

We squeeze ourselves onto the bus, which reeks of mildew, vomit, kerosene, and betel nut, struggling over legs, bags, boxes, sacks, jerry cans, children and bedrolls. It is like being pushed through a sieve. Still more people pile on, until we are jammed in too tightly to move, and the ticket collector has to walk on the backs of the seats. The engine rumbles to life and Hindi film music comes screeching out of a speaker. “Oh misery,” Leon groans, “we’ve got the one with the sound system.”

After thirty minutes on the winding road, a few people begin to vomit, out windows if they are near them, onto the floor if not. People cover their noses and mouths with their sleeves against the smell. A chicken escapes from somewhere and a child kicks my shins trying to catch it. Someone spits betel nut juice on my shoes. The ticket collector sways precariously from his perch and clutches at a woman’s head to prevent himself from falling into her lap when the bus brakes suddenly. People who want to get off at an unscheduled stop gesture to him, and he pounds loudly on the ceiling or the back wall: bangBANG, bangBANG, bangBANG. Disembarkation requires a contortionist’s skill and a great deal of determined uncivility. The open windy ride to Rangthangwoong seems like a luxury now. “Which would you rather have,” I ask Leon, “eggs Benedict with freshly squeezed orange juice or ...” I cannot finish.

“Valium and a Scotch,” he answers flatly.

We say goodbye to Tony in Khaling, and Leon gets off in Wamrong, wishing me luck getting a gypsum truck from Tshelingkhor. “If there’s no truck, and it’s getting dark,” he says, “stay in Tshelingkhor. Don’t walk in the dark. A kid fell off a cliff last year trying to take a shortcut somewhere along that road.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll just book into the Holiday Inn for the night,” I say grumpily, thinking of the two miserable, bamboo shacks by the roadside.

“The Hilton has better room service,” he says. “Bye!”

There