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It’s our country, after all. We’ve been here since time immemorial. They came here from Nepal only when Bhutan started to develop. They came here because they had nothing in Nepal, a northern student tells me.

My family has been here for a hundred years. I have just as much right to be here as they do.

If they don’t want to abide by the law of the land, they should leave. If they want to be Nepali, they should go back to Nepal. They’ve never been loyal to Bhutan. In their houses, they put up pictures of the king of Nepal instead of our His Majesty.

They never wanted us here. When our people first came, it was because they needed us to work. They gave us land in the south where the jungles were full of malaria. And our ancestors cleared the land and planted oranges and cardamom and we became prosperous. That’s what they don’t like.

They’ve been bringing their people in illegally, the border with India is open. If we don’t take care of this problem, we’ll be swamped. We’ll be a minority in our own country.

We’ve never been treated equally. Just look at all the ministers—there’s only one southern Bhutanese. Our people can only go so far. There’s always been discrimination.

There has never been any discrimination against them. They get free schooling and health care just like the rest of us.

You can’t trust them. They appear very simple on the outside, but inside you don’t know what they are thinking.

You can’t trust them. They want a “greater Nepal” and that would include part of Bhutan. They want to take over, like they did in Sikkim.

The voices grow shriller. I try to present each side with the other side’s arguments. There are angry denials. Don’t listen to them, that’s all propaganda. You can’t trust them it’s all their fault they want to destroy us our culture our rights those people this is what they’re like.

Ordinary words swell with heat into rhetoric, and no real discussion is possible, only the same script, recited again and again. Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte—this comes back to me from a poststructuralist seminar, with a distressingly different meaning, and I wish I were back in a Canadian university, engaged in discussions about language that would make no difference to the world outside; how easy it was to talk about hegemony and discourse from the margins in a well-lit classroom where no one had to whisper and keep watch out the window and students did not disappear at night.

This is not about democracy or rights, I think. At the most basic level, it is about tribes. Loyalty to one’s race, and fear of the other. Each half thinks it makes a whole story on its own, and neither side will acknowledge that there is another side. I have not heard one person speak of mediation or negotiation or even the listening that is necessary for understanding. There is no recognition of any overlap, any common ground. Already it is a case of two solitudes.

One morning, I fall asleep during a meeting, and wake up to find I have been appointed to the “exam committee” which will meet “today itself only” after lunch. I arrive ten minutes early to find my colleagues already engaged in a blistering debate over a title for the head of the committee. Convenor? Controller? Supervisor? Excuse me, my dear sir! I beg your pardon! If you will kindly listen! They go on and on until I think I am going to scream.

“But let us ask our Canadian colleague,” Mr. Ahmed says, and five heads swivel toward me.

“Convenor, controller, head honcho,” I answer. “This is a complete waste of time.”

There is a slight pause and the discussion resumes. Mr. Gupta is finally elected controller, Mr. Ahmed coordinator, and they decide that they will decide between them who will go to Delhi to pick up the exams. They exchange smug smiles, and I realize the whole debate has been about this, an all-expenses-paid trip to Delhi. Shakuntala and I used to laugh at the wheeling-dealing schemes of the more mercenary lecturers; today I am infuriated. I walk out. Silence follows me to the