Beyond the Sky and the Earth

by Jamie Zeppa

  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, yappi
ng 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.

  Energy is eternal delight.

  A Secret in Eastern Bhutan

  He 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.

  One night, he wakes up shouting in Nepali. “Tshewang! Shhhh! I hiss, shaking him and pointing upwards.

  “What? What?” he asks, bewildered.

  “You were shouting! In Nepali, no less!”

  We stare at the ceiling in horror, and then fall back onto the mattress, shaking with laughter at the thought of explaining, at the thought of merely trying to explain, to Mr. Chatterji.

  We are both terrified of someone finding out. We don’t know exactly what would happen, but if the principal is raging against students having relationships with each other, he certainly won’t be amused by this, and the other lecturers—well, I can just hear them now. Tshewang dreads Monday morning assembly when the principal addresses the students. “It has come to my attention,” each speech begins, and Tshewang is certain that one morning, he will say it has come to his attention that an improper relationship has developed between one of the lecturers and one of the students. Then we say we should stop this, we decide that it cannot go on, there is too much at risk. We lie on our mattress on the floor, holding each other, staring into the shadows, searching for a way, finding none. Okay, last time, we say. This is the last night. After tonight, it’s over.

  But he always returns, and my door is always open.

  It is an affair housed in one tiny room, window closed, curtains drawn, door bolted, a relationship conducted in whispers and gestures, by candle light, in the uncounted hours of the night. Laughter is stifled in pillows, cries are swallowed or buried in flesh. I long to go outside with him, into ordinary daylight, walk down the road, laugh out loud. We talk about going to India during the winter holidays, to Calcutta where we will be two among ten million. We will walk down Sudder Street, hold hands in bookshops, we will go into a restaurant and sit at a table and no one will know us, no one will care.

  But inside this room we have another kind of freedom. We live outside of scheduled time, according to our immediate wants. We get up in the middle of the night to cook packets of instant noodles. We mix up spicy salads of tomatoes, chilies, cucumbers and crumbled cheese, which we eat from a cooking pot with tablespoons. We make love and sleep, wake up and read, we talk and fall silent. I write a love letter on his thigh, he writes me a long musical dirty message in his sharp minute script on the wall above the mattress. We discuss how many children we would like to have, and whether we would give them Bhutanese or English names, and what kind of house we would like best, we tell each other family stories, secrets. There is time to talk about nothing, to lie with our limbs entwined, absorbed in our separate books. In this room, our everywhere, there is time to spare, time to waste, time to play. When we are together here, we feel disrobed of nationality, personal history, past betrayals and future anxieties. We are pared down to simpler, more lucid selves. In this room, we are two people who love each other. I have never known a flow of affection as pure and as easy as this.

  But the moment we get up, dress, prepare ourselves to separate, time contracts painfully, shrinks around us, becomes tight and inelastic. When he has gone, I remember all the things we do not talk about, like is it true that Bhutanese who marry foreigners can not be promoted past a certain level, and could he ever be happy outside of Bhutan, and will this relationship work outside of this room, in real time. In this room there are few causes for quarrel, no push no pull, no stress, no others. We have few misunderstandings, but this means only that we know each other in this one place, in this one way Outside this room, we have no idea who we are, who we would be together.

  Outside this room, we are actors, cool and distant, nodding politely when we pass each other in the corridors of the college. In class, he is just Tshewang, taking notes, asking questions, muttering asides in Dzongkha that make his friends laugh. We become good at the split, the deception. We watch each other without ever looking. I am aware of him in the corner of the auditorium, I hear his voice through concrete walls, feel him moving down the hall outside the classroom I am in.

  We are careful to do nothing to arouse suspicion. He is an excellent student, but I am careful when marking his homework. Not that it matters—his final exams will be marked in Delhi. I will have nothing to do with the grades on his certificate.

  Except he misses so many early-morning classes that he fails economics.

  Spring flourishes into summer and we barely notice.

  When we cannot be together, we write letters, a dangerous practice considering how disorganized Tshewang is, shedding bits of paper, dropping books, losing notes. He leaves for his summer break and time without him is so painfully slow and barren that I don’t know how I will get through it. It turns out I don’t have to—he returns early, and we spend the next nine days in our room. We tell each other all the fears we can think of. “I am afraid you will get tired of this,
” I say. “I am afraid you will want a real relationship.”

  “Isn’t this real?”

  “I mean a relationship with a woman you can go outside with. Go to Pala’s with. You know what I mean.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll go to Canada and abandon me.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll tell your parents, and they’ll beg you to put a stop to this.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll tell your parents, and they’ll beg you to put a stop to this.”

  “What would your parents really say, Tshewang?”

  He thinks about it. “Honestly, I don’t know. They wouldn’t understand if I converted to another religion, I know that, but about other things, they’re very tolerant. Now, what I’m really afraid of is that I’m going to die if I don’t eat a green vegetable soon.”

  We have been living on noodles, eggs and chocolate for a week.

  “I’m afraid I can’t do anything about that.”

  “You could go get some spinach from the Matthews’ garden.”

  “Or you could go.”

  “Or I could go, and they could look out their window and see me sneaking out of your house.”

  “All right, all right. I’ll go.” I creep out stealthily, casting nervous glances at the windows of the upstairs flats as I collect an armful of vegetables. Tshewang cooks a sumptuous meal of red rice, spinach in butter and garlic, and a salad of green chilies, spring onions and tomatoes. We stand at the backdoor after we have eaten, drinking in the air and eating raisins for dessert until a door opening upstairs sends us scurrying back inside.

  The monsoon unleashes itself in a cloudy fury, the students return to the college, and still no one has found out. There are no secrets in eastern Bhutan, except this one.