Tej’s Reviews > We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies > Status Update

But perhaps this is the point. After all, what better way is there to demonstrate our lack of power? Yes, this is how you break a heart. With a wire fence that shows everything that cannot be touched. While the wind sweeps the expanse, while the rain clouds roam, free as ever. We get a glimpse and nothing more.

Tseten laughs, unconvinced, but he doesn't press us either. He seems to have the same patience as others here. Maybe it's the land that demands it. Things reveal themselves in their own time, or not at all.

She is so plainly Lhamo's child, so plainly mine. Even Bhim must see this. But neither he nor Dolma can know my dizzying bewilderment. It's as if the earth and sky had traded places. The woman whose body succumbed to flames, whose ashes flew above me just a moment ago, has now returned. Her mouth, her small hands, her narrow shoulders. Yes, she is here.

To the songs of a thousand frogs and goat bells, I weave through the footpaths of the camp. With a kerosene lamp, I walk like a ghost, a light floating in the hills. I am the feared and derided oracle. I am one of her lovers. No man can have what's mine. Not my new husband, not some monks.

From that moment on, I was no longer Doh-ma, a short, soft name spoken with the deepest recesses of the throat and ending with the sound we utter from our first breath: ma. Instead, I became Dol-mah, a name that lurches at each syllable and ends as if to ask: Is that really you?

Have I ever tasted anything at once so perfectly sweet, salty, and creamy before? It's a kind of torture. Shumo watches us with a smile. As the sweet nectar melts on my tongue, the words I burned your letter fill my mouth and nearly spill out. But I say nothing.

Tears pooled in my eyes as I contemplated my self-sacrifice. I secretly worried that I would be a coward. I also worried that my blood would be the colour of their flag, which now flew over every house and even our monastery. Let my blood be white, I prayed. Let it be the color of the gods, white like the khata. But I had seen that everyone's blood is the same colour. When it flows, when it merges, blood is nameless.