'Bhutan is a great country, but not for me'

She was following her dreams. Perhaps, too recklessly. But as fate would have it her dreams were in store in a world far away from hers.

Sonam Yangki, turned 19, took this giant step to give up her studies and travel westward. In pursuit of her dreams. She made this decision and never looked back.

At the airport on the time of departure, she had wiped the last trail of tears on her face, and cast an ominous glance to the world she was leaving behind. She knew she would not see this beautiful country for years to come. Or never again.

Since then seven years have lapsed in between. And in the intervening years, countless imaginable things happened in her life.

The fond memories of her native land spring up at the very word of home. She alone knows the pain of missing, even as she says, “Bhutan is a great country, but not for me.” But deep inside she realizes that her home beckons her, as much as her heart wishes for.

Down memory lane, she says, she had qualified for her tertiary education when she decided to leave for Europe. “Maybe I had other plans in life. I had always wanted to get married, have a happy family, so on and fort,” she says. “And problems at the home front added to the misery of studying. So I had to work, and do something for my family.”

And work she did a lot to earn. From babysitting to working as a bar tender, she has done it all. “More than my survival, it was about saving every last penny to send it back home,” she says of the hard times she went through. “Those were the times when I realized I did not have a friend. I was a lonely woman fighting a lone battle of life.”

many a time, she wanted to rewind the moment she had looked back from the staircase of the airplane. She had wished if only she had gone back. Not long before she realized that she was sinking in a muddle of depression. The angst and paranoia of the West had already started eating her life away.

“I was emotionally unstable. I was unhappy,” she mutters. "I had no money. I had no home. I was working day in and out. I wanted to go back home."

Just in time, a savior in disguise comes her way. It was an ideal rendezvous. A love at first sight, almost a-fairy-tale-kind, she narrates. And as instantly as she glowed, her face turns pale and gloomy. She stops half way through, and bluntly says, “I can’t do this any more.”

After a brief pause, she resumes: “I was working in a restaurant at that time and he used to come there often. That’s how we met. That’s where it happened.”

A year after she moved in with him. Married happily ever after. A few months earlier, she had her first baby girl. “Today I am not baby sitting anyone’s but my own baby,” she breaks into a fit of laughter. “Better know that.”

But there are still tensions back home. Nobody approves of her marrying a white man. “My relatives and friends always ask me, ‘did you think Bhutanese men were exhausted?' But it was my fate that brought me here. It was my fate that married me to a white man,” She tries to reaffirm herself.

Only she knows how much it meant to be loved and taken care of in a strange world. Her parents, she says, is disappointed because now she is not coming back home. The irony is, they wanted her to go away then. To earn the hard buck. Now they want her back, and the tragedy is she can’t.

“This is my home. Bhutan is a great country, but not for me.”