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I’d just cashed $150 worth of traveler’s checks at the Bank of Bhutan in the center of town and had received 6,500 ngultrum. Pink and Ngawang each earned just 5,000 ngultrum every month for the long, erratic hours they logged at Kuzoo. Sir Tenzin counted it out in cash to each employee on the first of the month.

Eighty-seven hundred ngultrum was a lot by any standard, even for salvation. What would this puja cost if I were Bhutanese? I wondered.

The girls seemed keyed into this—embarrassed, even. Just because Rinpoche smelled a rich American didn’t mean they did. I was their coworker, their friend.

“You can think about it,” said Pink sweetly.

“Well, I don’t really have to think about it. That’s quite expensive.”

Rinpoche chattered a response in Dzongkha. Ngawang relayed, “He says if you pay a hundred dollars, that will be okay.” Her smile told me she was on to the extortionate monk.

For a split second, I worried this Rinpoche might pray to the wrong deities if I refused. Make my obstacles more intense. Then I remembered that I didn’t believe in spells. Superstitions weren’t the parts of this religion that made sense to me. What I’d been discovering, ever since that happiness class back home, about self-awareness, self-reliance, and compassion did.

I looked straight into Rinpoche’s eyes, and smiled. “Thank you very much for the consultation,” I said politely. “But I’d like to offer you something for your time and just go have dinner now.”

Eyes wide, Rinpoche spat out some words in disgust.

“He says he is not a businessman,” Ngawang said, looking up from her cell phone as if to punctuate Rinpoche’s displeasure. “He doesn’t want any money.”

The air in the seedy hotel room was thick and tense. I wanted to leave, but out of respect for my friends, I decided to swallow my frustration. I rose tentatively, afraid of seeming too abrupt, and the girls got up, too. Rinpoche collected his cell phone, a sleek Motorola RAZR like the one I had back home. He commanded us to wait for him outside.

At the noodle shop just behind the sole movie theater, in the center of town, Rinpoche slurped at his soup while watching cartoons on the television that bleated in the corner of the restaurant. Like an insolent little boy ignoring the grown-ups at the table, he fiddled with his cell phone. I made small talk with the girls. And when I asked the waitress for the check, Rinpoche waved his hand at me dismissively.

“You pay next time,” he said clearly in English, and reached into his robes for his wallet.

A WEEK LATER, Ngawang and I snuck out of the station before the afternoon hip-hop show that she hosted to visit her older sister, a doctor, at the hospital. The biggest workplace problem in Thimphu wasn’t yet that people surfed the Net instead of doing their jobs. There weren’t enough computers, and online access wasn’t reliable enough for that to be an issue. What chomped into the meat of the workday was the inevitable, interminable family visit. All day, every day, mothers, sisters, cousins, and boyfriends would just stream into offices, schools, and shops to say hello, drop off lunch, have a cup of tea, or just hang out. Because of this, I had met more family members of coworkers in Bhutan in a few weeks than I had in three years of working with the crew in Los Angeles.

The fact that one of Ngawang’s sisters was practicing medicine didn’t mean she was off-limits. Someone would bring us tea in the examining room while she was seeing patients, Ngawang assured me. She did it all the time. There wasn’t a sense of modesty or privacy in Bhutan; everything was communal. And there certainly weren’t any doctor-patient confidentiality laws.

About three quarters of the way to the hospital, we came to the National Memorial Chorten, at the confluence of the upper road and one leading into town. Every day, hundreds of people flocked here, from dawn till well after dark, to circumambulate this enormous and sacred religious structure