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“I don’t know,” Lorna says. “They don’t trust them?”

“But who are they locked in against? The boys?”

“I guess so.”

“So why don’t they lock the boys in, then?”

“I don’t know,” Lorna says.

“But isn’t it weird? Even the word ‘night-hunting.’ And if everyone is so relaxed about sex, and if women are so free, why are they locking the girls in? It’s just not acceptable.”

“It’s not acceptable in our culture,” Lorna says.

Outside, a hard heavy rain begins. There is something ominous in the force of it. I cannot see farther than the edge of the playing field. At 3:30, I begin to worry about the road back to Pema Gatshel. “If this keeps up, I’ll be stranded in Tashigang,” I say. “I’d better get back.” Lorna lends me a rain cape, and I set off. The path is now a mudslide, and at several places I have to sit and slither down. My pants are slick with clay, and rain runs down my neck.

The road south is already closed by the time I reach Tashigang, and I have to stay for several days, waiting for the landslides to be cleared and then for some form of transport. Each morning I sit at the Puen Soom, praying for a landcruiser, a hi-lux, a truck, a scooter, a donkey. One morning on the way down to the bazaar I even pray for the dreaded Vomit Comet and my prayers are instantly answered. There it is, revving up in a swirl of blue fumes.

The Question Why

The rains have turned Pema Gatshel a thousand shades of green: lime, olive, pea, apple, grass, pine, moss, malachite, emerald. The trees are full of singing insects, flowers, birds, hard green oranges, children. I walk along a stone wall, feeling my foot connect with every step to the earth, listening to the whirring humming world around. I stop to watch a woman weeding her garden. Her children are playing a game with stones in the shade of a flowering shrub, while three plump chickens scratch in the dirt. A little further on, I rest on a mossy boulder beside a waterfall, cooling my face and hands in the mist. A class II student and his father stop to offer me a handful of plums, and I refuse politely. Offer-decline, offer-decline, offer-accept. The plums are firm and faintly sweet. Above, the cleanest whitest clouds I have ever seen are banked up against the sky. It’s hard to believe now that I once thought this a landscape of lack, that I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough, wouldn’t fare well, wouldn’t be happy.

Yesterday, the kids brought me seven tiny, withered apples, obviously the last of last year’s harvest. Under the darkened, spotted skin, the yellow heart was almost unbearably sweet. In Canada, I would have thrown them out and gone to the grocery store to choose new, perfectly shaped, unblemished apples, the taste genetically engineered out of them.

Everything is more meaningful here because there is less of everything. Every brown farm egg is precious. I make yogurt out of sour milk, and turn overripe fruit into jammy desserts. A plastic bag is a rare and immensely useful thing. The first few did not last long, but now I am careful. I wash and dry and fold them away. I clean out jars and tins and plastic containers and save the tinfoil liners from cartons of milk powder. I stand in my kitchen, satisfied with the meaning of every item, thinking that my grandfather would be pleased. I am beginning to think that his cautious saving and counting and putting away have more to do with this measure of meaning than fear of future lack.

I like knowing where things come from. The cheese in my curry comes from the cow belonging to the family in the first house behind the hospital with the banana trees out front. I buy the cheese, fresh, still warm, wrapped in a banana leaf and tied with a piece of dried vine. The new flip-flops I am wearing are a present from Sangay Chhoden’s mother for the antibiotic ear drops I gave her for Sangay Chhoden’s baby brother’s infected ear. The cloth bag of peas in the kitchen came from Sonam Tshering, whose family lives in a bamboo hut at the end of the road and who cannot afford to be giving away