Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [63]
“So why do you stay?” Lorna asks. “If it’s that bad.”
“I told you,” he says. “Seventy-Five Thousand Dollars a Year.”
In Tashigang, we scramble out of the vehicle and don’t even thank him for the ride. It is late afternoon; we will have just enough time to get to Bidung before dark. We walk up through cool pine forests in the falling evening, to the ridges where the winds stay, stopping to rest under trees, at the base of a chorten, beside a cluster of prayer flags. We arrive in Bidung at nightfall. Lorna’s quarters, at the end of a dilapidated row, consist of a bed-sitting room and a dank, spidery kitchen with a mudstove. I rummage in my bag for my new flashlight to take to the latrine. “It’s true to its name, pit latrine, ” Lorna warns me. “They’re building a new one. This one is so disgusting, I don’t use it.”
“What do you use then?”
“The maize fields,” she says. “The maize is just high enough.”
“Oh, Lorna!”
But she is right, the latrine is exceedingly disgusting. Where the floorboards have not rotted away, they are covered in excrement, and I hope for Lorna’s sake they finish the new latrine before all the maize is harvested in the fall. When I come back, Lorna says we have just been invited to dinner by her “headless master.” “A nice man,” she says as we walk to his quarters, “but a hopeless headmaster. And he drinks too much, but then, there’s not a lot else to do out here, is there?”
Sitting on straight-backed chairs in a room identical to Lorna’s, we sip large cups of arra. “Dinner will take some time,” the headmaster tells us, pouring more arra. “Please have.” Two bottles of arra later, I am sitting with an empty plate in my lap, although I cannot remember having eaten. We stand up to go, and Lorna has to hold onto my arm.
On the way back, she says, “How did you eat that awful meat?”
“There was meat?”
“Yes, you idiot. It was putrid. I don’t know how you ate so much of it.”
I don’t know either. I awake hung-over. Lorna is getting ready for class. She has no classroom and teaches on the school verandah. Five small faces appear at her window. “Miss niktsing, ” they whisper excitedly. Two misses. On her way out, Lorna throws a packet of chicken noodle soup at me, part of a recent package from Canada, and asks me to make lunch. “Use wood instead of the kerosene stove, okay?” she says. “I have to haul the kerosene up from Tashigang. There’s plenty of kindling in the bucket in the kitchen.” I nod and go straight back to sleep.
Hours later, I carefully layer pieces of kindling and scrap paper in the bottom of the stove, sprinkle everything with kerosene and throw a lit match. The fire blazes up and I am pleased. Ten minutes later, the soup is still cold: the fire has gone out. I use more kindling, more paper, more kerosene. I poke, I blow, I curse. How is it that whole houses have been known to burn to the ground with one electrical spark, and yet I cannot warm a pot of soup with a bucket of highly flammable substances? I hear the door open and Lorna calls out cheerfully, “Hi honey, I’m home.” She is decidedly less cheerful when she sees that I’ve used all her wood and paper, and almost all the kerosene, and the soup is still cold. She fiddles with the charred remains in the stove, and the fire leaps to life.
We sip the hot soup and eat cream crackers, and discuss various romantic developments among the expatriate teachers. Lorna has already ruled out the possibility of romance with any of the Canadians. “They’re good buddies,” she says. “But nothing more.” I ask her if she has seen anything like the night-hunting we heard about during our orientation, where young men court women by climbing through their windows at night.
She says yes, and this is why the girls at school are locked in.
“What do you mean, locked in?”
“Locked in the hostel. At night. From the outside.”
My mouth drops open. “They’re locked in from the outside? What if there’s a fire or something?” I say. “Why can