• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Dear God, am I being fixed up? I wondered as I savored the spiciness of my wine. Was he widowed, divorced; was she a Bhutanese lady; were there kids? Half the generous glass Walter had poured for me was already warming my insides.

Martin, whose name isn’t really Martin, looked my way and said a lukewarm hello. Perhaps I was as much a surprise to him as he was to me. He handed over a pot of jam to Madam Choden.

“Here’s all that’s left of Claudine,” he said, smiling, and I supposed this Claudine must not be deceased. If she were, this Martin was pretty crass.

Walter led us out to a beautifully set table on a glass-enclosed patio filled with plants. A cat lay wrapped around a lamp, her stomach rising and falling peacefully with each breath. We could have been in the French countryside, or in a cabin in North Carolina, or in a thousand other charming places on a quiet day. But where we happened to be was in a pretty cottage in the capital city of Bhutan at the dawn of twin holidays.

“I can’t place your accent,” I said to Martin, as Walter poured him a glass of wine and refilled mine. I felt a bit greedy, but it was delicious.

“You can’t? Well, guess.” I was trying to be charming, but Martin didn’t seem to bite.

“Well, hmm, are you German?” Swiss-German, I figured. Maybe that’s how he knew Walter.

“German, la.” He looked at Walter. “Dear God, no. I’ll try not to be insulted. Germans, la.”

I couldn’t tell if Martin was trying to be funny in mimicking the Bhutanese way of talking. I was getting a bit drunk, and I feared I’d made an ugly American mistake by remarking that someone who was likely trilingual had an accent. Unilingual me was the one with an accent. I wished I were back at the station drinking watery instant coffee and listening to the music, helping RJ Kinzang line up country songs.

Casting about for a way to save face, I said, “Okay, I think I’ve got it. Thai! You’re from Thailand, that’s it!” Walter and Madam Choden were generous enough to laugh at my effort.

Martin looked my way and smiled; I hadn’t offended him terribly, after all. “Yes, la! That’s it!” He sipped some wine and patted the little white dog. “Actually, I am Norwegian, by way of Switzerland.”

With that settled, the conversation somehow turned to potatoes. The United Nations had announced that the next year would be “the year of the spud.” The tuber was so abundant in central Bhutan that there was talk of opening a potato chip factory. Both Walter and Martin were integrally involved in agricultural development in Bhutan, and they extolled the virtues of the vegetable as an important cash crop for Bhutanese farmers. I shared my anecdotal market research about the preference among the Kuzooers for imported chips in flashy packages over my preference: the tastier, fresher homemade kind.

“Packaged goods,” chimed in Madam Choden. “There’s a fascination here for packaged goods, because people never had access to them before. They’re seen as a sign of affluence, worldliness. That’s why we have so much litter. No one knows what to do with the wrapping, because few food items before ever came in wrappers.”

Circuitously, we moved to a discussion of Martin’s time in another part of Asia, where Walter and Madam Choden had lived for a while, too. He related a lengthy tale about an American girl with whom he had become smitten. She later published a story in a prestigious literary journal about the circumstances of their meeting. Martin found this very impressive, but it also left him with a measure of defeat. He had written his own interpretation of the events and hadn’t managed to get his into print.

I shifted uncomfortably. Martin was dominating our Losar lunch, when I’d been hoping to learn more about Madam Choden and her writing, and about the library in town where she was a volunteer, the museum she was building on her ancestral land, what her home district of Bumthang was like, and whether Bhutan was ready for its first democratic elections next year. Not