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I flee to Pala’s where I sit at a table outside, churning with anger. I don’t care if I make outright enemies among the rest of the staff now. There are too many facades to maintain. Nothing is going on, nothing is wrong, no students were arrested, no students were beaten up, no students ran away. No students are talking about joining a movement, no students are talking about joining the militia to fix up the students who join the movement. No students are talking because there is nothing to talk about. I am a foreigner, I do not know what is going on (nothing is going on), I am not involved. I have no opinion on anything. I am here to teach Shakespeare and the present perfect continuous and if the country falls apart around me, it’s none of my business. My business is with the staff members, all competent, dedicated professionals who get along famously.

Inside the restaurant someone is tuning a drumnyen, and voices try out a melody, stop and start and dissolve in laughter. At the next table, a student is poring over a tattered copy of Rolling Stone, another is engrossed in a biography of Bob Dylan. They are eating zow, rice crisps, which they throw by the handful into their mouths. I have seen the Bob Dylan fan in the library and on stage a number of times. He has a handsome face: high cheekbones, a luscious mouth, and a long fringe of jet black hair falling into his eyes. He looks over and smiles, and the result is dazzling. “Good meeting, miss?” ,

“How do you know I was in a meeting?”

“I was in the classroom next door.” His eyes are bright with laughter.

“You weren’t eavesdropping on your lecturers, were you?”

His answer is long and ridiculous, full of words like “sanctimonious,” “plethora,” “scalar,” ending with “sound and fury, signifying nothing. ”

I burst into amazed laughter. “So you were eavesdropping!”

His friend gets up to go, but he stays and talks. He speaks English faster and more fluently than any Bhutanese person I have met, darting from topic to topic, the British in India, Indian immigrants in Britain, Sufi mystics, Bhutanese methods of dream interpretation, international intelligence agencies, the Booker Prize. I can barely keep up. I cannot figure him out. He is worldly and obviously extremely well-read, but instead of the cool, breezy nonchalance that I have come to associate with the private-school set, there is an intensity about him that I find very attractive. Or maybe it’s just that he is unsettlingly good-looking. At any rate, I am sorry when he says he has to get to class. “Economics,” he says, “which I detest and despise.”

“Abhor.”

“Revile. Loathe.”

“Your nickname should be Roget,” I say. I wish he was in my class. I wish I could talk to him every day. He shoves his book into the front flap of his gho, and makes a funny little bow. “Good afternoon, miss.” He has a quicksilver smile and very mischievous eyes. His name is Tshewang, I remember. I find myself smiling long after he has gone.

A Silly Passing Infatuation

All around us spring unfurls. Peach and plum trees explode into blossom, the sky loses its hard winter glare, and the days begin to stretch out, afternoon light lingering on the mountaintops. A new English teacher arrives, a brilliant young woman from southern India with a sharp tongue and a head full of Marxist feminist literary theory. Her name is Dini, and she deconstructs the English syllabus one morning over coffee on my front step. “I’m not teaching that,” she says, stroking off a selection of essays, “or this poetry, and oh god, Shakespeare is so overrated.”

“You have to teach it,” I say, laughing. “It’s in the syllabus.”

“Syllabus shyllabus, I am not teaching it.”

We spend hours playing Scrabble and cooking vindaloo dishes that smoke with twenty-five different spices. She is a Christian, and her boyfriend is from a strict Brahmin family. They want to get married but his family will not allow it. She tells me stories of life in an Indian village, untouchables beaten for allowing their shadow to fall on an upper-caste man, or killed