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I remember this feeling. You really will get used to it, I want to tell her again; your clothes will fade and fray, and you won’t have time between study duty and morning clinic to curl your hair, and the walls in your house will look exactly like this plus your roof will leak and you’ll have rats, but you won’t care because you’ll be in love with the place you have suddenly woken up in. You will feel so lucky to be here. But I know she won’t believe it until it happens.

Blessed Rainy Days

Blessed Rainy Day, September 22, is supposed to be the official end of the monsoon. I sit under a blue-and-white canopy with the other lecturers, balancing a cup of oily suja and saffron-colored desi on my lap, watching an archery match. Only half the players are using traditional bamboo bows to hit the targets, short wooden planks set in the ground about 150 meters apart, and they are no match for the new compound fiberglass bows imported from abroad. I quickly grow tired of watching the actual game. Far more interesting are the players, the graceful dances they do when they hit the target, and the lewd gestures and songs they use to distract their opponents. The sky overhead is a fresh expanse of blue with a border of clean white cloud, except for a grey swelling in the south, which looks suspiciously like more rain.

It is more rain. It begins just before dawn the next morning and continues for two weeks, days and nights of falling rain and drifting mist and water trickling in drains, until I am sick of the sound of it, and the tiresome wet and chill of it. The damp insinuates itself into my sheets and blankets, and none of my clothes will dry. A cold turns into an ear infection and I cannot hear, it is like walking underwater. The sky sinks lower and lower under its own weight until the clouds are among us, breaking apart and hurrying past us like distracted ghosts.

After two weeks, I awake at dawn to the remarkable sound of nothing. Even without looking outside, I know: now the monsoon is over. The sky is clear every morning, and in the north one peak is bright with snow. The clarity is stunning. I feel dizzy, almost drunk on the amount of light. The hills all around are plush and green, and the trees are full of cicadas and flocks of birds that have migrated down from higher altitudes. The days are soft and warm and buttery; the sharpness in the early morning air melts away in the full sunlight. In my garden, the summer flowers are crowded out by rusty marigolds and orange and yellow nasturtiums. In the villages all around, sliced pumpkin and apples are set out to dry in flat baskets, and on farmhouse roofs green chilies turn a rich dark crimson in the sun. Long strips of bloody beef and chunks of pork fat are hung over clotheslines. When dry, they will be chopped into flaky pieces and served with chili sauce, or cooked for hours into a stew. The rice paddies turn gold around the edges, and the rice stalks droop under their own weight.

I cannot write to Robert anymore. The writing comes out slowly, stiffly, it sounds like another language in my ears. When I try to write about my love for Bhutan, it feels like a betrayal of him, and I am not sure why. Perhaps because I feel I have fallen in love with the place, the way you fall in love with a person. I write letters addressed to no one and stick them in my journal.

What I love most is how seamless everything is. You walk through a forest and come out in a village, and there’s no difference, no division. You aren’t in nature one minute and in civilization the next. The houses are made out of mud and stone and wood, drawn from the land around. Nothing stands out, nothing jars.

Time has become a melding of minutes and months and the feeling of seasons. The colors are changing, the light that comes slanting over the rim of the mountain grows cooler. I have trouble remembering the date. I ask my students what day it is, but by the time I get to the next class, I have forgotten and must ask again. Yesterday, I started a letter