As a young girl, Tsomo asks her mother, Where is the furthest I can travel? Where?

her mother responds, I dont know. Where can a girl travel to? Caught in the everyday reality of household life, fifteen-year-old Tsomo is suddenly called upon to travel when her mother dies. She makes her first journey to a faraway village to light the ritual butter lamps in her mothers memory. Beginning here, her travels take her to distant places, across Bhutan and into India. As she faces the world, a woman alone, Tsomo embarks on what becomes a life journey, in which she begins to find herself, and to grow as a person and a woman. The first novel by a woman to come out of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, The Circle of Karma, written in English, is rich in detailed descriptions of ritual life. The measured pace of its prose, the many nuances of the story, the different levels at which the narrative works, weave a complex tapestry of life in which the style and content are closely interwoven, each informing and enriching the other. Review: Review from Terry Reis Kennedy from the Deccan Herald, April 17th, 2005 From the time Tsomo, the heroine, desires to learn to read and to write, but is denied because she is a girl, until the moment she ends up an old nun, she never fully understands why women are regarded as less capable than men. Whats astonishing, perhaps, is that all the women in her life keep this myth alive. The only man in the book who fully appreciates her is her guru, a Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche. Tsomo suffers several lifetimes in the course of one. Whatever she longs for: The love of a faithful husband, children, and a stable family - turns out to be an unrealised dream. Most of the time she is wondering why she was born. The few moments of happiness she does manage to experience dissolve and turn into nightmares. For example, her first husband, Wangchen, literally crawls into her bed one night and claims her as his wife without so much as a kind word. Only after she becomes pregnant with his child does she realise he is unable to feel anything towards her but perfunctory lust. In fact, he openly takes up a relationship with her younger sister, demanding that Tsomo accept the beautiful teenager as his second wife. The truth is, Wangchen doesnt formally marry either of the women because the man is not a man at all. He acts more like an immature adolescent than a responsible adult. Consequently, Tsomo runs away from her home after her child is born dead. She decides its better to die free than to endure the continuous beatings Wangchen begins to subject her to. And her sisters refusal to toss even a crumb of sympathy in Tsomos direction doesnt help matters. But it is when she gets a job as an itinerant road worker, nearly starving to death, and suffering a mysterious post-pregnancy disease that makes her look as if shes still with child that Tsomos life really turns into hell! Out of this hell (and the several more that follow) she eventually makes peace with the

fact that she is alone, unloved, and getting old. In the end she is ordained a nun by her Rinpoche and the circle of karma is supposedly complete. Sadly, though, I was not satisfied. Maybe Im just too analytical to believe that a Road to Nowhere, as one of the chapters is called, turns out to be the gateway to Nirvana. I would have preferred a more investigative, rather than idealised, account of what most Bhutanese women allegedly did - a few decades back - after they were raped, exploited, and forced out of their homes by their men. I dont want to believe that their only recourse was the nunnery. Nevertheless, in spite of the heavily Buddhist point of view which urges the faithful to give up all lifes attachments in order to achieve Enlightenment and lasting bliss, and in spite of the ever-so-distracting and incalculable copy-editing oversights, The Circle of Karma is worth reading. If nothing else, it made me feel many emotions, not the least of which was gratitude -gratitude for the life of comforts I do have - including the right to hold men accountable for any crimes they might commit against me.

Kunzang Choden was born in 1952, in the year of the dragon, in Bumthang, Central Bhutan. She spent her early childhood in Bhutan but went to India (Darjeeling) for her primary and secondary education. She has a BA Honours in Psychology from Indraprastha College in Delhi and a BA in Sociology from the University of Nebraska, USA. She has worked as a teacher and later for the UNDP in Bhutan. From 1990 onwards, Kunzang has been writing on Bhutanese oral traditions, folklore and women. She lives in Thimphu Bhutan with her husband and continues to research and document Bhutan's oral traditions.