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By Root 499 0

the boys are singled out for responsibilities and recognition by the staff while the girls are pointedly ignored, how the number of female students decreases sharply in the upper classes. During the orientation, we were told that women in Bhutan enjoy much more freedom than women in other Asian countries. Women in Bhutan own shops and hotels and small businesses, they travel when and where they want, and schooling is free and open for both sexes. Unlike India, there is no dowry system and very few arranged marriages; daughters are as valued as sons, divorce is acceptable, widows remarry, and family property is usually passed down matrilineally. And yet, in the school, another set of values seems to be at work. In the lower classes, the girls are still bold and confident, but they become increasingly shyer as they move into the upper grades. They put their hands over their mouths and giggle when addressed; they defer to the male students and seem to shrink a little more each year. I wonder if sexism is somehow a by-product of Western-style development, or the number of Indian teachers in the school system, or if chauvinism is just as deeply embedded here as anywhere else. When I ask the older girls why so many of their friends have dropped out, they tell me they were needed at home, or they had gotten married, or their parents thought that education was irrelevant since their daughters were going to inherit the family house and land.

“One letter is there for you, in the headmaster’s room,” Maya says, and I slip across the hall. It is a letter from Robert. I have this idea that I will put it, unopened, into the top fold of my kira until lunch, that I will take it home and savor it slowly. I do not. I rip open the letter and read it right there, standing in the headmaster’s office. Robert writes that he misses me. He has received my postcard from Thimphu and my first long, long letter. He wishes he could call me. He writes about school, what’s gone wrong with his car this time, the weekend with his parents, the skiing is finished, it has been a mild spring. The letter is full of details of daily life, and I feel reconnected and homesick, close and far, at the same time. And then I get to the end, just before the love and x’s and o’s. He says he has read my letter over and over again, but he just can’t get a handle on where I am and what I am experiencing.

“Where are you?” he writes.

The bell rings for the next period but I stand in the office, the letter dangling from my hand. I don’t know how he can ask where I am, how he cannot understand. I wrote everything.

The monsoon has begun in earnest. The rain in March was just a little prelude. The mornings are often clear, and I get up early just to watch the sun float up over the dark hills behind the school. By early afternoon, the clouds have rolled in again, blocking up all views. It rains most heavily at night, and I like the sound of the falling water on the corrugated iron roof now, the steady reassuring pressure of it. I no longer worry about the road and what it might or might not bring—mail, visitors, supplies. I will not starve. I will be taken care of, I know that now.

If I get up early enough, I have an hour or two to myself before someone knocks at the door. I boil water for coffee on the new gas stove Trevor has brought me from Samdrup Jongkhar. It cost one month’s salary (which I had to borrow from the headmaster) but it is worth it. Back in bed with my coffee, I read, write in my journal, listen to the now-familiar sounds of chickens and roosters and cows and children. Once or twice, I have gone out for a walk at dawn, and have been surprised at the number of people already at work: tending cows, carrying water, collecting firewood. I think of the students who have already begun their three-hour walk to school, having risen and dressed and eaten a breakfast of cold rice in the dark.

The first knock at the door is usually one or two kids, bringing me vegetables. I pay for these things, even though the headmaster told me not to. “It is because you are the