The king is everywhere. He is on the ‘long live’ stickers pasted on the windscreen of trucks travelling between Phuentsholing and Thimpu, and he is on national television where traditional Bhutanese shows dominate programming. He is on the six-lane expressway that cuts through the mountains and allows the Nissans, Toyotas and Hondas to zip at 80 kmph on the last leg to Thimpu, and he is high up there on Druk Air, the only airline that operates from the Himalayan kingdom’s only airport in Paro. He is there when trekkers struggle up nearly 3000 feet from Paro to the Taktsang Monastery where, alongside the waste pits marked ‘Biodegradable’ and ‘Non-degradable’, placards pronounce his ‘benevolence’, and he is there enforcing a current ban—though often covertly breached—on chicken and tobacco. He is there too on a bottle of Special Courier whisky, which at Rs 20 for a peg is among Bhutan’s most expensive drinks and is a product marketed by government agencies. The King is just about everywhere in Bhutan.

He is there again, looking on from an overhead poster, as Sriram snips my hair at his modest little saloon in Paro. A poster of the King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, is mandatory at business institutions, informs Sriram’s uncle Binod Thakur, and they had to buy theirs from a local bank. “He is a good man, so nobody minds,” Sriram reasons. Many years ago, the Thakurs travelled up from Bihar ‘s Darbhanga and away from the petty politics and crime that pockmarks life there, says Sriram. “There is no class or caste divide here, and nobody bothers anybody. You don’t even need to lock up your home when you leave,” says Thakur.

... contd.