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That afternoon, as we walk out of town, I ask Karma Dorji if his parents hit him. “My mother is not beating,” he says.

“But what about when you are very naughty?” I ask.

“Then shouting,” he says. “My father is shouting and then sometimes beating. But Phuntsho Wangmo, you know Phuntsho Wangmo, miss? Our class Phuntsho? Her mother is beating. Her mother is very kakter.” Kakter means hard, difficult, rough.

“And the teachers at school, they are beating, yes?” I ask. They all nod, and Norbu says, “Only miss is not beating. Why not beating, miss? ”

“Because class II C is very good,” I say, and they laugh. “Not good, miss. We is very naughty.”

Then I tell them, slowly so that they will understand, “In my village, in Canada, if I beat my students, their parents would get very angry. They would call the police and I would have to go to jail.” But even as I say it, I hear the falseness in it. I try to calculate how many years ago corporal punishment was used in schools. I remember the strap in my elementary school. I cannot explain to them the complexity of the issue, the debate over physical punishment, the legal aspects, parents suing teachers, children suing parents. I cannot explain the state of things in North American schools, where teachers do not hit the students but students sometimes hit the teachers, the slow poisoning of the relationship between teacher and student, breaches of trust and abuse of authority, the hopeless lack of self-control that no one seems to know how to address. Things are different in North America, but in the final analysis, not any easier or any better, and I am sorry now that I have given that impression. Here again is the mind, leaping from emotion to speech without reflection. I have learned nothing.

Three days after this conversation, tea break in the staff room is interrupted by a disturbance outside the headmaster’s office. A man with a stick is speaking quietly, angrily in rapid-fire Sharchhop. Maya tells me that Mr. Iyya split open a girl’s knuckles in class and her father has come looking for him. The door to the office closes and we can hear nothing more. We sit in the staff room, watching the mist settle over the school yard, listening to the start of the rain on the roof, waiting for the end of the story. The office door opens, and the man leaves the school. The headmaster looks exhausted. The father was furious, he says, and he was hard-pressed to stop him from taking that stick to Mr. Iyya. He has promised to keep Mr. Iyya under control. The father in turn has promised not to beat Mr. Iyya on school property, but warned that Mr. Iyya now comes to the bazaar at his own risk.

I walk slowly across the playing field, letting the cold rain soak me. The hem of my kira is wet and heavy against my ankles, and my flip-flops sink into the mud. I feel like I am struggling through deep water. You do nothing, you keep quiet, and a teacher breaks open a girl’s hand. But at least something has been done. Perhaps it was right to stay out of it and let the parents come forth on their own. But if the girl had been a boarder, if she had had a different, less confident father, perhaps no one would have come forth. The girl would have been sent to the hospital for stitches, and Mr. Iyya would continue to hit and degrade the students. I want to know whose responsibility it is to do something. Just because I am a foreigner, an outsider, just because this is not my home, does that mean I should stay silent while children are beaten by a crazed, vicious adult? It’s a slippery slope on all sides, and I do not know where to draw the line between cultural sensitivity and plain old cowardice.

The Shrub’s Name Is Miss Jammy

I am perched on a counter in the kitchen, waiting for a pot of water to boil, remembering how in the beginning, I hated to come in here. The discolored walls and cracked concrete sink made me think longingly of warm and well-lit kitchens with shelves full of pretty things. Porcelain cups and