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By Root 651 0

the minutiae of how this particular queen was actually one of four) was appearing at the renowned Jaipur Literature Festival in India to promote her book. My would-be hostess, a woman charged with helping revamp the entire nation’s future, is also expected to attend to her queen; when the queen goes on a trip, this woman is expected to accompany her. No one considers that her two roles might create a conflict. No one thinks it strange that I schlepped around the world, at my own expense, to find no instructions have been left for me. (I wonder what the McKinseyites, who preach the language of efficiency, must think of the idea that the royal family still takes precedence in this democracy. I also wonder how long it is before anyone—at the newspapers, in the private sector—openly starts investigating the finances of the royal family. Even in the burgeoning age of investigative journalism, that would still be unthinkable now.)

Royalty has back-burnered my purportedly urgent mission. I know better by now than to be surprised by this. And yet, this time it annoys me. A lot. I don’t want to be here, a chilip in the land of chilies. I want to go home. I love this city, even if it is becoming ever grittier and more congested; the streetscape of Thimphu has infiltrated my dreams. For so much, I owe Bhutan an enormous debt of gratitude. But this is not where I belong.

The view of the valley out my hotel room window is the same angle as that of the live shot on the BBS after-hours filler. I squint and wish I could transform the twinkling lights of the city before me into what I can see from my apartment window in Los Angeles.

It occurs to me that if I shift the bed away from the wall and in front of the heater, I might soak up a bit more of its warmth.

FOR A FEW days now—without much else to do and after hanging out with the staff of the new weekly newspaper, Business Bhutan, and running into old friends—I’ve been trading text messages and emails with the opposition leader, Tshering Tobgay. He’s statesmanlike in an Obamaesque way, supersmart, direct, striking, and accessible to the people through various channels: his blog, Facebook, Twitter. I met him briefly two summers ago in a shop in Thimphu, where I was buying a cell phone recharge voucher and potato chips on my way back to Kuzoo, and he breezed in to pick up a snack for his daughter, who was waiting in the car.

“Hey, I just saw you on TV,” I said. This was before the National Council voted to prohibit televised proceedings of its debates.

“Yes.” He smiled. “And who are you?” I explained that I’d been volunteering at Kuzoo. It turned out he’d heard my reports from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and was a fan of public radio from his time at Harvard. That radio job may have driven me a bit batty, but it sure offered street cred.

Now, a couple of years later, here we are on a windy winter afternoon at Karma’s Coffee, sitting with our dueling Mac-Books over a series of hot brewed coffees, commiserating about Bhutan’s future like two old friends. I share what I’ve managed to glean about the McKinsey plans, how the MBAs are making lists of sacred sites and landmarks around the country and figuring out how to rank them as “products.” The various districts of the country are being broken down into “circuits.” “The Eastern circuit,” as the young, smiling McKinsey lady describes it, will be where meditation centers are developed for Westerners who wish to travel to the “spiritual heartland” of Bhutan, as if there is such an actual location, and pay thousands of dollars to live authentically through homestays with the locals. Meditation centers in the last Buddhist kingdom? Isn’t that like building igloos for Eskimos? Land is currently being claimed under rules of eminent domain and regional airports are being developed so that future visitors won’t have to suffer through the rocky, undulating, death-defying twenty-four-hour drive across the country on the national “highway.” Soon the previously underexplored side of Shangri-la, home to unspoiled natural wonders and simple