Beyond the Sky and the Earth (36 page)

“No,” she says. “People don’t emigrate here. At least not that I know of. The way you feel now—well, I can understand the way you feel now, because it’s so beautiful and it’s so different from where you came from, but that feeling won’t last, and then—”

“Why shouldn’t it last?”

“How can it?” she says. “Someday, you will wake up and ask yourself, what am I doing here? Don’t wish to stay here forever. If what you’ve been telling me about Buddhism is right, you shouldn’t want to hold on to it, right? You should enjoy it and then let it go. I know you didn’t ask me for advice, but I feel this so strongly I just have to tell you.”

And she has a point, I can see that, from some other part of myself, perhaps from some distant future place, looking back, I can hear that she is offering very sound advice. Unfortunately or fortunately, I do not know right now, I cannot take it. I close my eyes and throw my stone and make my wish.

—
H.F. Amiel,
Journal Intime

B
ehind the frosted glass sky, the sun is a blurry orb of weak light. A tenuous blue-tinged mist like woodsmoke lies over Kanglung. The bare branches of trees tremble in the cold; the ground is rusted and blighted by frost. Inside my house, my bags are scattered over the sitting room floor, half-unpacked. Presents for various people are piled up on the altar, magazines and books for students, chocolate and newspapers for the Canadians who didn’t go home. I arrived in Kanglung a week ago, heart singing to be home. Now I am weeping into a cup of black tea. I don’t know why I have come back. I don’t know where I belong. I don’t know what to do.

I have come back because I have not had enough of these mountains. Because I have not finished with Bhutan. Because Bhutan is not finished with me. Because I am under a spell. Because I am in love.

Today I picked up my timetable. I will teach Tshewang’s class this year, which should not have been a surprise to me, but the sight of his name on the class list was a jolt. I don’t want him in my class. Before, we had that small, dubious, precarious space. A relationship would have been difficult but not impossible. Now it is unthinkable. Except I am still thinking it.

I swallow the last of the cold bitter tea, and put on a sweatshirt. Outside the college gate, I begin to run slowly uphill, fighting against the slope, my feet pounding on the tarmac. I run until my lungs are full of knives and then I stagger back.

At home, I swab the grimy floors with a virulent mixture of hot water and kerosene. I drag mattresses and quilts outside and drape them over chairs to air. Mrs. Chatterji waves from the balcony upstairs, where she sits reading in a cane chair. From the college store I bring three tins of paint and a paintbrush; I paint the walls in the sitting room and the bedroom. I move the divans, the desk, change the order of the books on the shelves.

I sort through stacks of notebooks and paper and photographs. I burn boxes of old letters. I make lesson plans for my first class on William Blake. I go to a staff party and make a strenuous effort to converse with Mr. Matthew. This is where I belong, in the staff room, talking with colleagues. I have come to my senses.

I stay up late reading a history of the English language. I turn off the lights and my senses betray me. I pull the blankets over my head, roll and twist and turn. I want to see him, I want to talk to him. I want to hear him laugh. I want I want I want. I meditate on the cycle of desire, the endless wanting and grasping that lead us to wrong understanding, wrong speech and wrong action, and the negative karma they generate. I meditate on the body, breaking it down into bone and hair and fat,
decay is inherent in all component things
. I meditate on the certainty of death. I fall asleep, empty at last, wanting nothing, free.

I wake up in the morning with his name in my head. Tshewang. It means the Power of Life. A crow flaps noisily into the pine tree outside my window, regards the world intently with its black-bead eyes, then lifts itself effortlessly up, and I watch as it wings its way toward the mountains at the far end of the valley, stark outlines in the cold north light. I remain rooted, caught. I cannot extinguish this hunger, this hope.
If any should desire what he is incapable of possessing, despair must be his eternal lot
.

He does not come to the first class. I stand at the front of the room and make a slow careful X beside his name, unsure if what I feel is blessed relief or crushing disappointment.

He comes instead to my house, just as night is falling. I begin to babble. “Come in, Tshewang, it’s good to see you, sit down over there, move that stuff aside, yeah, just push it over—would you like some, some coffee? Tea? Lemon squash? I have some books for you, did I tell you that already? Just let me find them here in this mess ...”

“Miss,” he says in a small, tight voice, “I can’t go on like this.”

I cannot go on like this, either. I will have to go back to Canada. There is no other option. “Tshewang, this is all my fault. I should have—”

“Miss,” he says loudly, and I wince. “Listen. Just listen.” His gaze is frozen on the cuff of his gho. “I love you.”

I want to weep.

“Well?” he says in a voice as hushed as dust. “Have I ruined everything now?”

“No. No.” I sit down beside him and hold his hand. We are both trembling. I tell him that I’ve been in love with him since I don’t know when, that I tried my best not to be, but I am. He nods, squeezes my hand tightly.

“But there’s nowhere for us to go. We can’t see each other, we can’t be together. We’re just—just
stuck
here. We can’t have a relationship.”

“We already have a relationship.”

“But it can’t go beyond this. I mean, we can’t sleep together.”

“Oh,” he says. “No. I knew that.” He goes to the window and pulls the curtain edge over the bit of night showing through. “But, miss?”

“Yes?”

“It’s up to you. I told you that before. And I’ll accept whatever you say. But the truth is, I don’t see why not.” He smiles wickedly. “Aside from all the obvious reasons.”

“The obvious reasons are pretty big reasons, Tshewang.”

“Well, yes,” he says slowly. “But love is a big reason.”

“Don’t you care that I’m your English teacher? And a foreigner? Don’t you care what might happen? Don’t say you don’t care—it makes me crazy. It’s just not true.”

“Well, of course it’s not true,” he says, exasperated. “Of course I care. I wish you were the shopkeeper’s daughter down the road, but you’re not. So what to do.”

I could say we should do nothing. It is too risky, too difficult, I could say it is all wrong, and it would never work out, and we would regret it in the end, so let’s turn back now. But I am tired of pretending to myself and fighting with myself. Underneath all my efforts at detachment was this singular, driving, persistent attachment. I want Tshewang far more than I ever wanted to give him up.

I pretended that I was resisting out of the ethical considerations but the truth is I resist because I am afraid. My time in Bhutan, my whole journey in fact, from the day I first read the name in the newspaper until this very moment, has been a coming to these edges, these verges, high places where I am buffeted by winds and dazed by the view, by the risks and the possibilities I never imagined could exist in my life, where I am astonished that I could get so high up, how on
earth
did I get so high up, where a voice whispers JUMP and another cries DON’T. Where I could turn back and walk down to safer ground, or I could throw myself over that edge, into
what
, what is out there, what is it that I am so afraid of beyond this last safe step where I am now standing? It is only my own life, I realize, that I am afraid of, and at each high point I am given the chance to throw myself over and back into it.

I am sobbing with the realization, and Tshewang is panicked, telling me shh, shhh, he is sorry, he will go, and I tell him to stay, it is not that at all. He puts his arms around me and I cry into his gho until the tears stain a dark lake in the wool, until I am exhausted and lighter than air, and then I take his hand and lead him out of the sitting room into the hallway where we stop to kiss, and I feel a million tiny windows flying open in my skin. We look into the bedroom. “Not here,” Tshewang whispers, and pulls the mattress and quilt off the bed and into the dining room, where the single window can be easily covered with one piece of cloth. He lights a candle stub and sets it on the floor under the table. The shadows grow and shrink crazily, and then the flame burns steadily, and the room becomes still. In a moment of painful awkwardness, we stand side by side, looking at the bed on the floor. The only remedy is to take off all our clothes as quickly as possible. Once we have plunged directly into nakedness, shyness is impossible, and we curl up on the mattress beside the candle, wrapped in the quilt, whispering. Outside, the night has deepened, and we are held in a rich dark silence. He is a warm and ardent lover, completely uninhibited. It is as if we have been lovers for years.

“Tshewang, there’s just one thing.”

“Hmmm?”

“You absolutely have to stop calling me ‘miss’.”

He snorts with laughter. “You prefer ma’am? Shall I call you that?”

I hide my face in the quilt and laugh. I am safe here, with him; in the middle of the biggest risk I have ever taken in my life, I am safe. “Jamie,” he says. “How is that?” I like the way it falls from his tongue into two clear, neatly balanced syllables. “Don’t let me go to sleep,” he says, “I have to leave before morning.” But we both drift off and awaken to daylight sounds: a broom scraping concrete steps, windows being unlatched upstairs, Miss Dorling muttering to her two snapping, yapping Apsoos as she passes by. I don’t know how he’ll get out unseen now. In the kitchen, he pins a towel up over the window and makes sweet tea which we drink from one mug. I ask him if he wants toast, and he pulls an alarmed face, as if I had just offered him something insane for breakfast. He says he will eat rice at Pala’s, thanks. I watch as he dresses, pulling on his gho, crossing one side over the other, aligning the seams, checking the hems. Grasping the sides, he raises the hem to his knees, then folds the sides back into two neat pleats. One hand holds the pleats in place, the other wraps the belt around his waist.

“How do I look?” he asks, smoothening down his hair. “Guilty?”

“No,” I laugh. “Do you feel guilty?”

“No. I feel happy.”

I wait at the back door to let him out but he heads into the sitting room. “Tshewang, you aren’t going to walk out the front door!”

“No one will know that I haven’t just stopped by this morning to get a book,” he says, and grabs one from the shelf. A last kiss behind the door and then I wrench it open. We are suddenly separate, he standing on the steps outside, I in the shadow of the door frame inside. I am shocked at the sunlight, the bright trees, flowers, voices, the whole ordinary world awake below us, the same as it was yesterday, except that I feel I am seeing it from a perilous angle and my heart is pounding wildly, and I wonder if I will regret this. “Thanks, miss,” he says loudly, formally, becoming Tshewang, student proper again. He raises the book. “This should help my writing.”

“Oh yeah, that’ll really help,” I say, biting my lip. He looks down at the book for the first time, and throws his head back and laughs. I love him. I regret nothing. He strolls off, stuffing
Recipes for a Small Planet
into his gho. I close the door and lean against it, feeling the wood against my back, blood running in my veins, warmth in my palms, the trace of the last kiss.

H
e leaves his hostel room at night, after eleven, taking the most circuitous routes across campus. He must avoid students returning late from Pala’s, the hostel dean, the night watchman, houses with lights still on, and the dogs. The dogs are the worst, he says, and we are glad when it rains, because the dogs take shelter under the hostels and the black curtains of rain hide him as he sprints down the road to my house. He turns the handle of the unlocked door slowly, and pads across the floor. We go into the dining room, now our room, where we lie on the mattress on the floor, beside the candle burning under the table. Sometimes he returns to his room before dawn, gliding out the back door into the wide night, but often he stays until morning, and then he walks out the front door with a book or a sheaf of papers in his hand. His boldness terrifies me, but no one seems to notice. “People come to your house all the time,” he says. “Of course people will suspect something if I sneak out the back door. The trick is to walk out like everyone else.”

Often, we don’t sleep until dawn. I doze uneasily, waking every twenty minutes to look at the changing light. I have to teach at nine o’clock. I shake him awake but he burrows deeper into the quilt, his limbs heavy with sleep. Many mornings, I go off to teach and he sleeps through his economics class.