Thimphu

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I’ve always hated the way my husband washes dishes — each plate, cup, fork, bowl, pan scrubbed and rinsed under a constant stream of hot water. “It’s wasteful,” I used to tell him, having grown up in the kind of home where showers were timed and candlelit dinners were sometimes necessary but never planned. But today, I don’t say a word. I tell myself I should just be grateful he washes them at all. 

“What should we do for dinner?” he says without turning my way, all six-and-a-half feet of him hunched over a sink built with petite women in mind. Dog barks and thunder consume the silence while I consider — it’s monsoon season in Thimphu, when the city’s dog packs struggle to make sense of once-clear borderlines washed clean.  

“I could make curry?” I offer, knowing neither of us really like curry anymore, but it’s been too long since we went shopping so we’re out of everything else. 

My husband pauses mid-scrub, leaving the faucet running, “Or we could go out?” he tells the wall in front of him.

“Sure.” 

He turns the faucet off and wipes the counter with a rag I’ll wash later. We lace up hiking boots and button up raincoats from REI. “Fresh mountain air will be good for us,” I remember my husband saying the day we bought our gear, as if we couldn’t get fresh mountain air in Washington. As if healing would be as simple as breathing. 

“Yeah, maybe all we need is a change of pace,” I’d replied, doubtful even then but happy to hope for as long as it made sense. We’d hiked almost every day the first couple of months — usually together — until the rains came.

I walk out the door first and wait for him to lock it. Our neighbors wave and we wave back; Hindi-pop bursts through their open windows and follows us down the lane for a while, eventually fading away until thunder and dog barks take center stage again. When we pass the cannabis plants that grow wild in Thimphu, I can’t help but smile. “They’re really thriving,” my husband notices with a smile of his own, and I remember the time we harvested enough buds to fill multiple joints. I remember how we kissed each other through the haze — how, when we were through, he said, “Don’t get up,” before fetching us water to drink and apples to munch. I remember how we fell asleep on a pallet of blankets and pillows that night, too tired and too comfortable to make it all the way to the bedroom. I wonder if he’s remembering too. He’s probably thinking about what to order. 

The restaurant’s within view when my husband stops in his tracks. “Looks like we’ve found the source of all the barking,” he says, nodding at the scene in front of us: opposing dog packs stand on opposite sides of the lane — a plethora of teeth and fur and noise. 

“I guess the only way is through,” I respond, eliciting a nod from my husband. 

The closer we get the louder the dogs become, until suddenly, they’re all I can hear. Even the thunder — reduced by the quarreling packs to little more than a dull and distant rumble — barely registers. The packs are so loud it takes me a minute to realize I’m holding my breath. They’re so loud I find myself reaching for my husband’s hand, intertwining my fingers with his, grateful when his grip matches my own — grateful, in spite of myself, to have a tall, broad man by my side. 

But even when we reach their center, the dogs don’t seek our gaze, don’t cease their barking, don’t sniff our boots — they don’t seem to notice us at all. They don’t seem to notice when they’ve granted us safe passage through the territory they’re disputing — they don’t seem to notice when I’ve stopped holding my breath. 

I relax my hand and my husband lets it fall, the dogs are behind us and the restaurant is only a few yards away. “I think I’ll get ema datshi and momos,” I say. 

“Me too.” 

"Thimphu" was first published by Remington Review in 2020.