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By Root 460 0

home and wrote July and realized only when I looked outside and noticed the gold and brown creeping into the hills all around. Leon says it is the Bhutan Time Warp and I know what he means. Time does not hurl itself forward at breakneck speed here. Change happens very slowly. A grandmother and her granddaughter wear the same kind of clothes, they do the same work, they know the same songs. The granddaughter does not find her grandmother an embarrassing, boring relic. Her grandmother’s stories do not annoy her, and what she wants is no different from what her grandmother wanted at her age. In the village, there is little to keep up with. When change does come, everyone has time to get used to it. Glass windows, a corrugated iron roof, electric lights, immunization, a school. Everything that happens in the village will be remembered, because what happens affects everyone, it is everyone’s story. It is not something happening to strangers on the other side of a city, on the other side of the ocean, announced today, displaced tomorrow by newer news, the latest development, this just in. Just how fast development will change this is impossible to know. In school, the kids are taught a new order of things. There must be many students like Tobgay, no longer able to tell their parents what they are learning. When the outside world catches up, everything will accelerate, and grandparents will shake their heads and sigh over their grandchildren. The wholeness that I love will be lost, and yet I cannot say that development is bad and that people should go on living the way they have always lived, losing four out of eight children and dying at fifty. Development brings a whole new set of problems as it solves the old set. I must be careful not to fall into the good-old-days trap.

For now, though, I am glad to be a part of the Time Warp. I feel exhausted when I remember my last year in Toronto, rushing to class, the grocery store, the bank, a movie, a meeting, always feeling that I had not caught up, fearing that I never would, because there was so much to do and see and buy and say you’ve done and seen and bought to be on the cutting edge, to be where it’s happening, not to be left behind. Now I have time in abundance. There is no one to catch up to, and I don’t have to be anywhere but here. I have no idea what is happening in the outside world, what wars or famines are being turned into ten-second news clips, what incredible new technologies are revolutionizing the way people die or dream or do their banking. I lost my watch in Tashigang and the digital face on my alarm clock faded out in the monsoon damp, but I am learning to tell time by the sun and the sounds outside, and I am hardly ever late.

I have fallen into this world the way you fall into sleep, tumbling through layers of darkness into full dream. The way you fall in love.

I am in love with the landscape, the way the green mountains turn into blue shadows in the late afternoon light, the quality of the light as the sun rises above the silver valley each morning, the unbearable clarity of everything after rain, the drop to the valley floor far below and the feeling of the great dark night all around, and knowing where I am, and being here. I am in love with the simplicity of my life, the plain rooms, the shelves empty of ornaments, the unadorned walls. I don’t want to go home at Christmas (I don’t want to go home, ever). They never warned us about this at the orientation.

The field director in Thimphu sends a wireless message saying the flight to Toronto that I asked him to book several months ago has been confirmed.

Durga Puja

Shakuntala and I spend most of our time together. We are united against the knot of bickering staff members by our love for the place and our easy relationship with the students. Some of the lecturers begin to treat us with cool disdain; Shakuntala thinks they disapprove of two unmarried females being let loose upon the world. We make up bogus Latin names for the worst of them and cackle loudly in the library; we excuse ourselves from the